We all have a desire to live on after we have gone. The snapshot aids this ambition and allows for reflection on our lives, the decisions we made, and how we evolved (or not) since the shutter was released. I often work with my family’s film photographs because they are a physical reminder of when they were made and how they were shared. In the past, sharing a photo album was an intimate and revealing act, whereas showing artwork is always a public one, and making these paintings is both. I began inserting my adult self into some paintings to depict a yearning

My recent work combines hand-formed figurative elements with bold, decorative backgrounds to depict queer spaces defined by lust, friendship, and tragedy. Using the symbolic, time-honored imagery of the flower and the butterfly as stand-ins, my paintings represent the bodily presence of the individual or the playful mise-en-scène of group interaction. Overlapping surfaces and dizzying patterns create energetic compositions, while paper pulp gives the work the feel of hand-molded intimacy.

Wherever one goes or comes from, home remains a place to have and to work toward. Feelings of comfort and belonging hold us captive, and these senses can occur in a specific place or simply the physical walls of a house. Ritual becomes the keeper of boundaries within the home. This storytelling comes from an interior place of living two cultural lives and manifests from digging through the past of personal monuments and archived histories. Gathering personal symbols authenticates something forgotten and resurrects it to be experienced again. It allows

The degradation of images and culture is the primary focus of my work. Inspired by Twitter and internet memes, I explore the idea of shared content being a placeholder for human emotion.

My work mirrors the couch I sit on every day and the plants I water a few times a week. The cushion has an indent from my weight and the plants will die without my attention. Objects seen have been touched and have stains from purposeful and meaningful use. My eyes can feel and remember my hands holding the objects. These recorded moments exist somewhere in between the piles of clothes on my floor I ignore until laundry day and the plants I let come a little too close to death. One is trying to have a tender moment with itself and the other is concerned with how

Systems Stenciling Process Tactility Textiles Dancing Mirroring
Reflectivity
Drips Geometry Ephemera Reclaiming Gliding Stacking
Repeating Glowing
Pulsating (Non-) Performance
Temporality Repetition Chaos Sweat
QPOC Representational
Space
Duration Action Scale Units Laminate Residue Spilling
Concentration Community
Justice Structure Embodiment Selfconcept
Utopic Simplicity Grids
Profiles Objecthood #yalepayneter
Display
Presentation Implicate Navigate Integrate Meditate Negotiate

Peeling, flipping, and gashing are in the spectrum of actions I practice in an endless effort to digest my doubts about artmaking. In order to swallow the pleasure, I flip, tear, and dig. The deception of everyday objects having a particular function in the world calms my anxieties while I am out in the open, though it stirs them again when I am in the studio. I gouge, cut, and reorder; it grounds me, reminds me that objects are not sacred. Labor is. When it comes to color, my doubts seem to disappear. Above all else, I see myself as a colorist: I use color to trace the relations

I work with wallpaper that I design and produce myself, both digitally and by hand. I affix layers of wallpaper to a surface, rip them away, and then collage them back on. My process is one of digging and building, cutting and pasting. I continue until the piece feels right. Sometimes it’s when it looks like an actual artifact, a found wall. Or sometimes it’s the exact opposite, a completely new thing.

This work is engaged with the negotiation of multiform cultural identities. I am expressly concerned with exploring the intersection of contrasting cultural information, hierarchies of representation, and conflation in the expression of otherness.

Through a combination of sewn and painted gesture, I explore the notion of ambiguity by capturing the visual moment of movement and manipulation. The cut forms of fabric sewn into the surface of my paintings are legible and abstract at the same time, allowing room for interpretation.